Catch the Saint (2 page)

She told him, and it was a
name that was only vaguely familiar
to him. She
immediately added, “But there’s nothing to be done.
My solicitor, who was gracious enough to advise me without
col
lecting his fee, has told me I have no legal
recourse.”

Simon Templar thought, but
did not say, as he headed towards
Kingsway, that
where legal recourse left off was usually where his
own
endeavours began. As most guardians of the law knew, how
ever inconsequential their posts and their locations
throughout
the world, Simon Templar was not
exactly their comrade on the paths of licitness. While Mrs Evelyn Teasbury knew
him as a
handsome young man always dashing to
and from his house at
odd hours of the day and
night, to those who dealt with him directly he was a renegade whose methods
simply ignored the existence of conventional statutes which did more to
protect the
criminal than the criminal’s prey. Yet
his results were of a kind
that could as a rule be
heartily (though perhaps secretly) ap
plauded by the
police, the clergy, and other traditional sentinels
of
righteousness. Perhaps it was this invariable element of justice in Simon
Templar’s extra-legal deeds, and the fact that the bene
ficiaries of his forays were usually the weak and defenceless, that
had earned him his nickname, “the Saint.”

Julie Norcombe, like
almost everyone who could read a news
paper in those days, had heard of the
Saint, and had a general idea of what he stood for; but it had never occurred
to her that
he might take an interest in
her problems, weak and defenceless though she certainly felt. It seemed she had
spent most of her
twenty-two years of life worrying about one thing or
another.
Was she too thin? Was she pretty or
ugly? What would her
mother say if
she did this, or didn’t do that?

On one particular night,
however, she had something nice and
solid and specific to worry about, and
not just something that
could be put down to
what even she recognised as an irrational
lack of self-confidence. Only two days before, she had taken the
first great breathless leap from the maternal nest
in Manchester
and come down to
London to stay with her brother, Adrian. The
idea was that she could
live in his Chelsea flat until she could
test
her wings and see what she wanted to do. Adrian, four years
older than she, was no paragon of strength and
stability, but he
was conscientious and reliable, and she thought that
he really
cared about her.

So it was not like him to
worry her by simply disappearing within forty-eight hours of her arrival. He
had received a telephone call late in the afternoon requesting him to see a
dealer
about an order for one of his paintings. Adrian had not wanted
to go, even though he was naturally pleased at the
prospect of a
sale, because he had been working all day in his studio at
the back of the flat and was tired. He had had a quick tea and then
left her, promising to be back within an hour or
two.

But he had not come back
in two hours, or three, or even six.
Julie had grown at first uneasy, then
frightened, not only for
Adrian but for
herself. In her mother’s vivid diatribes, London
would have fitted appropriately and unobtrusively somewhere be
tween the eighth and ninth levels of Dante’s
underworld, so re
plete was it with
thuggery, thievery, chicanery, arson, and rape
… not to mention an
atmosphere of general debauchery that
would
have corroded the soul of John Calvin himself.

Adrian Norcombe did not
drink. In fact he had none of the
vices
traditionally associated with artists. He was neat and clean,
trimmed his beard every morning, hung up his clothes,
washed
his dishes (until his sister took over that chore
for him), and was
punctilious about keeping appointments
on time. It was totally unlike him to be late. No business haggling could have
kept him
so long. His sister was literally in tears at round three
in the
morning, and she practically ran to
the door when she heard the
shoes
clapping and scraping on the steps outside. There was a
chain lock, which allowed her to look out without
exposing her
self to one of the
assaults so picturesquely predicted by her
mother.

To her horror, it was not
Adrian who stood outside the door,
but three grim-looking
men against the background of an
equally grim-looking
black car.

“Oh!” It was
half gasp, half cry, as she slammed the door shut
again
and fumbled to throw the bolt.

Knuckles rapped
insistently on the wood.

“Miss, open up
please. Miss?”

“Go away or I’ll call
the police.”

“We are the police.
Special Branch officers. About your
brother.”

Julie now had to struggle
to free the bolt again. But she
stopped short of removing
the protection of the chain. She peered
out
at the shadowy faces.

“What’s happened to
my brother? How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

From outside, her own
face, back-lighted by the yellowish
glow from inside the flat, looked gaunt,
her eyes abnormally
large, as if she had
been starved by something more extreme
than
post-war rationing. But when she stepped back a little into
the room to study the card that one of the men
had slipped to her
over the door
chain, and the light fell more evenly on her fea
tures, even the least discerning visitor would have observed that she
was quite a beautiful young woman.

She peered out at the men
once more for a moment, and then slipped the chain from its catch and opened
the door. They came
in quietly, removing their hats,
already looking round the room
with mechanical
thoroughness.

“What’s happened to
him?” Julie asked, putting her hand
against the back of an
armchair for support in case the answer
was
too shattering. “Has he been in an accident?”

“Before we discuss
this, I’d like to be certain who you are,” the
spokesman
for the Special Branch officers said. “Presumably
you’re
his sister.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have some
identification?”

The other two men had begun moving
systematically round
the living-room,
occasionally picking something up and putting
it down again. Julie wondered if they should be doing that with
out asking her permission or producing a warrant
or something, but she was too timid to protest. She got her purse and satisfied
the officer that she was indeed Julie
Norcombe.

“Please tell
me,” she begged. “What’s happened? Do you know
where he is? He’s been gone for hours.”

“I’m afraid I have
some rather unpleasant news for you, Miss Norcombe. Your brother has been
arrested.”

The girl had to go further than to lean on the
chair. She sat down in it like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been re
leased. Nobody in her family had ever been
arrested for anything.
They had never even known anybody who had ever
been ar
rested. The whole idea was as alien
as a round of beer at a
Temperance
luncheon.

“He couldn’t
be,” she protested. “Adrian would never do anything wrong.”

“How do you know
that?” the officer asked her, as his col
leagues
continued probing about the room.

“Because I know
him,” she answered. “He’s my brother, isn’t
he?
He’s just not the kind to break the law. What is he supposed
to have done?”

“Have you noticed
anything strange about your brother’s
movements lately?
Any changes in his habits or schedule?”

She wished that the man
would answer her questions before asking more of his own, but she replied
hesitantly: “I wouldn’t
know, would I? I’ve only
been here since Tuesday.”

“This past Tuesday … two days
ago?”

“Yes.”

The officer nodded as if
she had confirmed something he al
ready knew.

“Did you notice
anything different about him? Say, compared
to
what he was like the last time you visited him here?”

“I’ve never visited
him here before. He’s always come up to Manchester.”

The spokesman jerked his
head towards the other two men.

“You don’t object if
we have a look round, do you? It’s necessary.”

“Well, if it’s
necessary
…”

Julie determined that she
would at least follow these detectives
—even
if they wouldn’t tell her anything, she might get an idea
what they were after. They went down the hall past the bedroom
and bath to
the rear of the flat, where Adrian’s studio adjoined
the kitchen. She was very glad she had done such a thorough job
of cleaning the kitchen after tea; nobody could
seriously suspect
a man with such a
clean kitchen of committing a crime.

“Can I do anything to
help?” she asked.

“Just continue giving
us your co-operation,” said the officer in
charge.
“Do you have other relatives living in this area?”

“No, Adrian is the
only one. All the rest are in Yorkshire. Except for some on the Isle of Man;
that’s on my mother’s side, but
only cousins. And then
there’s…”

“But in other words,
there are none in London.”

Julie shook her head.

“What about his
friends, or people he does business with? Do you know many of them?”

“No. As I told you, I
only just got here. I haven’t met a soul.”
She
tried again to assert her own right to ask questions:

“Where is he? Can I
see him?”

“No. I’m afraid
not.”

They were moving more or
less as a group from the simple
kitchen into the paint-and-turpentine
atmosphere of Adrian’s studio. Adrian was a frugal man, but he had been more
lavish
with light bulbs in his studio than
in the rest of the house, and
compared
to the subdued illumination of the living-room and
kitchen, the place had something of the
brilliance of a floodlit
stage.

Curtains had been drawn
across the large windows; the sky
light reflected
the easels, tables, stools, and colour-smeared boxes
and
cloths that were arranged round the room. Adrian Norcombe
obviously was a traditionalist, as numerous sketches and
canvasses showed. His style varied, it seemed, from
Renaissance
to mild Impressionism, but among the
examples of his work
there were no cubist conglomerations,
no abstract shapes or ex
plosive splashes. In the
centre of the floor was his current project, a very large canvass resting on
heavy supports, its central
feature a very large
rosy-hued nude girl lounging in a cow-
pasture beside some
Corinthian columns.

The painting was the
first thing that had aroused the interest of
the
two silent searchers, who stopped in front of it and surveyed
the lavish contours of its central figure with more respect than
they had shown the kitchen utensils.

One of them drew down the
corners of his mouth approv
ingly. “I wouldn’t
mind being on that picnic.”

“You can go to an art
museum on your day off,” the leader
said
brusquely. “Let’s get on with it.”

Julie felt her face flush,
and she avoided looking at the paint
ing or the men. Their behaviour seemed
rudely undisciplined,
and a surge of
indignation seemed to send some extra courage
into her system. She found herself speaking out almost sharply:

“I’d like to know
what you’re looking for. You can see that
he’s
not a rich man. I mean, he’s hardly been leading a successful
life of crime, and I’m sure you won’t find any stolen goods
here.”

“There are other
crimes than theft,” the officer said quietly. “More serious in the
long run, perhaps.”

The group moved back to
the hall and into the single bedroom
of the flat.